Antibiotic resistance, explained for the person taking the antibiotics.
MyPillPal turns public antibiotic resistance surveillance data into personalized, plain language context, so patients can walk into a doctor's appointment ready to have a better conversation about the drug they are about to be prescribed.
Built for the CSH Social Impact Ideathon 2026, Bio + Tech track.
Antibiotic resistance is projected to directly cause 39 million deaths between 2025 and 2050, roughly three deaths every minute. A major driver is inappropriate prescribing, and part of that is a communication gap: patients pressure doctors for antibiotics that will not help them, and when they do need one, they have no context for why a particular drug was chosen.
The data that would give them that context already exists. Antibiograms and surveillance reports are published by the CDC, the WHO, and state health departments every year. But all of it is written for clinicians, buried in dense PDF tables and paid clinical reference tools. Nothing translates it for the public that funded its collection.
Four screens, under two minutes, no account:
- Pick your infection type. Five common ones: UTI, cold or sore throat, pneumonia, skin infection, ear or sinus infection.
- Check your risk factors. Recent antibiotic use, diabetes, recent hospitalization, international travel, age, and more. Each one explains why it matters.
- Pick your region. Resistance patterns vary a lot by geography.
- Get your profile. A risk tier with a plain language explanation, the resistance rates for your infection in your area with sources, a personalized list of questions to ask your doctor, and what you can do.
The risk model is a transparent weighted additive score, not a black box. Every weight traces to a published study, and the app shows you which of your answers contributed to your score.
- Not a diagnostic tool. It never tells you what infection you have.
- Not a prescribing tool. It never tells you to take or avoid any drug.
- Not a replacement for your doctor. Every output is framed as context for a conversation, never as an instruction.
- Not a real time feed. Data comes from published annual surveillance reports, shown with their source and year.
MyPillPal provides educational health information, not medical advice. It does not diagnose conditions, recommend treatments, or replace professional medical judgment. Always follow your doctor's recommendations.
There is no backend. No accounts, no tracking, no analytics on health information. Every answer you give is processed in your browser and discarded when you close the tab.
React, Vite, and Tailwind CSS. Static JSON data, static build, no server.
npm install
npm run dev
The dev server prints a local URL. To check the production build:
npm run build
npm run preview
The build output in dist/ is a static bundle that any static host can serve.
The live version is deployed on Vercel: push to main and Vercel builds and
publishes automatically.
Resistance figures come from the CDC AR and Patient Safety Portal, the WHO Global Antibiotic Resistance Surveillance Report 2025, state antibiogram programs, and the GRAM Project's 2024 Lancet analysis. Risk factor weights come from published studies. The full list with citation rules is in docs/data-sources.md.
- docs/workflow.md how this repo is worked on
- docs/conventions.md palette, typography, and voice
- docs/data-sources.md citations
- docs/tasks.md build progress
PillPal is here for the conversation, not the diagnosis.